Dig Deeper:

Dig Deeper:

Up, up, and away! Squeeze more vegetables into small spaces with trellises.

Confessions of an Outlaw Gardener

When growing vegetables becomes an act of civil disobedience.

By Cristina Santiestevan

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Even before I moved into my house, I was making plans to break the rules. It’s a fine little house—a 1970s-era split level on a half-acre lot, in a neighborhood filled with other 1970s-era split levels on half-acre lots. It’s a nice neighborhood, too. Kids ride bikes in the street. Adults walk dogs and push strollers and pause to chat about the weather. When a winter storm brought a tree down in my driveway, my neighbor brought his chainsaw and helped clear the debris.

Yes, this is a nice neighborhood. But it’s governed by a homeowner association (HOA), and there’s the trouble. More specifically, here’s the trouble (excerpted from my community’s declaration of covenants, conditions, and restrictions):

Article VI, Section 10: Vegetable gardens shall be allowed in the rear or side portions of said lots only.

That was going to be a problem. The rear and side portions of this particular lot are heavily wooded with five maples, three pines, two dogwoods, and more than a dozen cedars. The brief snatches of sunlight that make it past those trees are not enough to support a vegetable garden. If I wanted homegrown tomatoes, I had to break the rule.

And so I became an outlaw. I expanded the planting beds along the foundation and stole some land from the lawn. I ripped out several overly sheared shrubs and replaced them with blueberries. I added an herb garden, planted native flowers, and began to sneak vegetables into the mix. The idea was simple: Grow a vegetable garden that didn’t look like a vegetable garden.